Some
years ago, writes Dr. Bauer, I went to the Czech Republic
(former Czechoslovakia), where I was born, with my wife
Elana. We drove to the town where my grandparents had
lived, Teplice-Sanov. My grandfather had a stationery shop
on a street I remembered very well, because as a kid I used
to spend hours there playing with pencils and paper. The
distance from there to my grandparents’ house was not great,
and I remembered: it went through an alley, kind of up a
gentle incline, until it reached a local rail crossing, and
just beyond that was a small two-story villa, with my
grandparents on the top floor, and another Jewish family—the
Baers—on the lower floor. There was a lovely little garden
around; my grandparents were not rich, but quite
comfortable. Elana and I found the street of the shop, and
then I drove up through the alley to the house, and was very
proud that I had remembered exactly how to get there. We
stood at the garden fence, and I was explaining to Elana
where my grandparents had lived, and as I was talking, two
boys were looking out of the window of what had been the
dining room, and they watched us very suspiciously. Then
they called their mom, obviously telling her there were two
odd strangers pointing at the house and gesturing, and so
on. When the lady came to the window, I called out, in
Czech, which I speak, that my grandparents had lived there.
She asked what their name had been. I said, Rudolf and
Camilla Bauer. Whereupon, she said she was coming down.
They opened the gate and welcomed us into the garden—it was
summer, and very nice.

It turned out she
was Jewish and had relatives in Israel. Her brother, she
said, was coming shortly and asked us to wait. Sure enough,
he came and we spoke about their relatives in Israel. There
were less than ten Jews in Teplice, and they were a part of
that number. And then they asked me whether I knew who the
downstairs neighbors had been. I said, “Yes, the Baers.”
“Did you know anything else about them,” they inquired?
“Yes,” I laughed. “My grandfather, a hefty man of village
stock, went every Saturday night to the pub for beer. He
and Mr. Baer were chums at the pub.” “ I know said the
woman because I am Mr. Baer’s daughter. My father who
survived the Holocaust used to tell me of his friend.”
“Your grandfather,” she continued, “died before the war.
How lucky he was.” The history of our families had come
full circle.